DE Summit

Please join us and your colleagues as together we share experiences in distance education delivery. At this conference we will learn the latest news about our Distance Education direction, and together form our next steps in continuing, and increasing, our offering of quality and robust online learning experiences for our students. You are encouraged to save the date for the 2nd annual DE Summit, Friday, February 24th 2017. This is a free event. Seating is limited so RSVP in advance to assure your seat. Lunch and a light breakfast is provided. Seating is limited to the first 120 RSVPs.

Join your colleagues from across the district as an active contributor to the future of online learning. We want your presentation proposal(s) about quality online learning. Proposals can be about enhancing successful fully online, hybrid, and web enhanced courses. The presentations can be teams or individuals. We highly encourage presenting on incorporation of High Impact Practices (HIPs) in the online environment. A few examples but not exhaustive: creating active student discussions, developing opportunity for students to bond and remove the “loneiiness” of online learning, developing visual resources such as short video and audio. developing critical thinking, humanizing the online classroom with faculty visually present, holding synchronized and visual time in the regularly asynchronized class, student research, student service learning, learning communities across courses, gamification, student writing across curriculum, promoting transfer to university, ways of encouraging completion and retention, methods for scaffolding the course for greater student success, creating a welcoming and safe environment, rescuing the failing/disappearing student, etc.

In addition to plenary sessions by our Academic Leaders and a Keynote speaker on the topic, the District Wide DE Summit Planning Committee is intent on providing workshops and symposia for faculty sharing best practices distance education and technology for online and hybrid classrooms. Consider presenting at one or more of the sessions. Several different forums are available to fit a variety of topics and time slots, including:

Those of us supporting quality Distance Education at Ventura College and at our Sister Colleges, Moorpark and Oxnard, are excited to bring to the Ventura campus the first ever District Wide gathering of Distance Education Faculty, and Staff.

It is the work each of you are doing in our online offerings that is making the opportunity for Distance Learning a reality for our students. I don’t need to tell you how much our students want quality distance education. Their early enrollment in our online classes speaks to their increasing wishes to balance the life demands they face while pursuing their education. What each of you bring to them through your work in offering online courses contributes to making their education dreams a reality. To continue this good work, we must once again face a major change in distance education as we look at venturing into the new State adopted Learning Management System, CANVAS. There is much to learn and share at this point of this new transition. Please join us and your colleagues as we learn the latest news about our Distance Education direction, and together form our next steps in continuing, and increasing, our offering of quality and robust online learning experiences for our students.